A home for all

If our identities are fluid, citizenship cannot remain dictated by archaic divisions and anxiety of otherness.

After much ado, there is finally light at the end of the tunnel as President Ramchandra Paudel has authenticated the bill to amend the Citizenship Act. And with the bill’s passage, it is as if the Dickensian dictum “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair” has come true in Nepal. On the one hand, the country has been rocked by the scandal of the state-sponsored metamorphosis of Nepali citizens into fake refugees. On the other, it has committed to becoming home to around 400,000 hitherto stateless people—and rightly so. The amendment allows the children of the parents who got citizenship by birth to acquire citizenship by descent. We say this as a matter of principle. Whether the new President could legally authenticate a bill forwarded by the previous parliament to the previous President—and the fact that a related case is sub judice in the supreme court—is a different matter altogether.